The Directors: Jacques Tourneur

I guess I owe my love of film noir to this little known French director.  I didn't see any of his movies for quite a number of years but once I saw his most famous film and fell crazy in love with it, I have never forgotten who this man was.  He never made another film as good as this noir but I saw many of them (some because he was the director) and enjoyed them all.

Jacques Tourneur came to movie directing through his bloodstream... his father Maurice was a respected French director.  Our subject was born in Paris in 1904 and he accompanied his father to the states when he was only 10.  While still in high school he got some gigs as an extra in movies and was a script boy on many of his father's Hollywood films.

In 1928 father and son returned to Paris and continued working on a number of projects together.  But in 1934 Tourneur the younger returned to Hollywood where he would remain for the next 30 years.

He picked up his American career at MGM, first as a second-unit director and then directed some 20 shorts for the studio.  Then he got a most unexpected break.

Tourneur had met future producer-writer Val Lewton when both did some work for producer David O. Selznick.  When Lewton went to RKO to head its new horror film unit, he remembered Tourneur.  Their first film together is one of their best... Cat People (1942).

It was on this film that he proved he was adept at evoking a sense of bizarre menace lurking in everyday situations.  He 

established his elaborate lighting tracking shots to create three-dimensional space.  He aggressively used music to create mood and used suggestion rather than special effects or makeup to frighten audiences.  His technical mastery made the bland appear spine-chilling.

French actress Simone Simon is fine as a young Serbian who lives in the States and marries an American despite her fears that if they are intimate she could turn into a panther as dictated by fables from her homeland. 

RKO execs were not thrilled with Tourneur's work after three days and wanted Tourneur fired.  Thankfully Lewton intervened and the B horror flick turned into a box office champ.  Okay, then, let's try for another...

Derived from Jane Eyre, I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is an atmospheric and haunting macabre piece of filmmaking about a nurse (Frances Dee) who is hired for a woman in the West Indies.  There is a walk with both women through cane fields on their way to visit a voodoo priest that is savored by horror film buff.  It, too, was a big hit.

Hollywood never liked to give up when it was on a roll.  The black panther, Dynamite from Cat People, returned to frighten folks in The Leopard Man (1943).  The story concerns a leopard that is part of a nightclub gimmick who escapes into the New Mexico night and kills.  It wasn't quite as successful as the first two but it would one day scared the bejesus out of a young me.

Tourneur's reward for directing three goose-pimply RKO productions was to helm Gregory Peck's film debut in Days of Glory (1944).  He plays a heroic Russian peasant out to save his homeland from the Nazis but the movie is so boring that Peck is lucky he went on to enjoy such a prestigious career.

Tourneur's first excursion into film noir came with the Hedy Lamarr-George Brent starrer Experiment Perilous (1944).  The story of a doctor who insinuates himself into a family he comes to suspect of a murder has always been accused of being a Gaslight knockoff.  Whether true or not, I enjoyed it and thought it is one of the wooden Lamarr's best performances.  It also demonstrates the director's mastery of shadowy menace.

Westerns are probably where one found Tourneur working the most over his career and Canyon Passage (1946) was the first.  On loan to Universal, his use of the stunning color photography helped sell the story of an Oregon businessman caught between his love for two women and his friendship with a nefarious gambler.  Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward and Brian Donlevy are the leads.  Hoagy Carmichael enjoys a supporting role and his song Buttermilk Sky became a big hit.

Tourneur with Mitchum and Greer

Then came the Big One... the best film Jacques Tourneur ever made and one of the finest film noirs in history, Out of the Past (1947).  Bitter, cynical, brooding, awash in beautiful lighting, breath-taking shadows and glorious confusion, the film is simply a masterpiece.  It gave Robert Mitchum his star-making launch and was the beginning of his long and deserved rein as one of the kings of noirs.  It provided Jane Greer, never more beautiful, with the role of her career, one that actresses can only dream of, a lawless femme fatale.  I could go on and on, ad nauseum, about this movie but I already have.

Berlin Express (1948) is Tourneur's third noir and while nowhere near as shiny as the former, it's still a fun ride on a train with espionage and murder on every car.  Tourneur's technique so suited the genre that it's a damned shame he didn't do many more.  Robert Ryan (ah, Robert Ryan) and Merle Oberon head a fascinating cast.

I should do a full review of Easy Living (1949)... I liked it that much.  Victor Mature stars as a hugely successful,  professional football player who deals with a disease that may sideline him and a shrewish wife who only wants to be married to a guy who's on top.  There is also the team secretary who's quietly in love with him for better or for worse.  Lizabeth Scott plays the wife and Lucille Ball the secretary... they switched roles just shortly before filming began.

It was around this time that there was a shift in Tourneur's career and his standing in Hollywood.  Most of his remaining films were not especially successful or memorable.  He was known for never turning down a directorial assignment and maybe he should have turned down some of his future projects.

Having gone to high school with Joel McCrea, they had spoken over the years of wanting to work together.  Eventually they would do so three times with the first being Stars in My Crown (1950) about a gun-toting preacher.  It's better than it may sound and McCrea claimed it was his favorite of all his films.  Young Dean Stockwell added his usual charm and superior acting.  Two costars were James Arness and Amanda Blake who would one day star in TV's Gunsmoke.

Tourneur began getting a reputation for being a serious drinker.  I'm not sure why he was particularly singled out in a profession and a town that never went dry.  Hollywoodites said he had lost his way. 

The Flame and the Arrow (1950) was a decent swashbuckler with Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo.  Anne of the Indies (1951) with Jean Peters as a pirate was another and not as good were Way of the Gaucho (1952) with Gene Tierney and Rory Calhoun and Appointment in Honduras (1953) with Glenn Ford and Ann Sheridan was dreadful.  Wichita (1955) with Vera Miles and McCrea as Wyatt Earp was a minor hit.

Tourneur had left RKO several years earlier but came back for the western Great Day in the Morning (1956) with Robert Stack, Mayo, Ruth Roman and Raymond Burr as a bad guy named Jumbo.  It concerns a drifter who wins a saloon in a poker game and his relationships with two women.  Not bad at all.

Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft in Nightfall

Tourneur returned to film noir for his last good film, Nightfall (1956).  Well-made, tense and exciting, it stars Aldo Ray as an artist who finds himself falsely accused of robbery and murder and is pursued by the cops and the real killers.  Anne Bancroft and Brian Keith costar.  Tourneur's bouts of alcoholism during this production seriously damaged his reputation.

He worked in a few low budget films including some American International horror films with the likes of Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.  But he mainly worked in television, a medium he loathed.

In 1965 he returned to France with his only wife and he died there in 1977 of unknown causes.

He was lauded for a number of his films.  Cat People and Out of the Past particularly put his genius in the big leagues but alcoholism did him in.

Next posting:

From the sixties